Too Many Cooks at American Ballet Theater?

At what point does versatility turn into anonymity? See, in particular, American Ballet Theater, which this century has been developing multiple personality disorder.

In its long spring seasons at the Metropolitan Opera House it has concentrated on full-length story ballets, largely from the 19th century; its fall seasons are an anthology of one-act ballets from the 20th and 21st centuries. Currently it’s in the middle of one such fall season, presenting nine one-act ballets made between 1944 and 2018 by eight choreographers. That’s admirable, especially as five of those works (Michelle Dorrance’s “Dream within a Dream (deferred),” Lauren Lovette’s “Le Jeune,” Jessica Lang’s “Garden Blue,” Wayne McGregor’s “AfteRite” and Alexei Ratmansky’s “Songs of Bukovina”) were made in the last two years. But what does Ballet Theater stand for? It’s been repositioning itself all this century. It has been, in various seasons, America’s foremost exponent of the repertories of Michel Fokine (1880-1942), Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), Antony Tudor (1908-1987), Kenneth MacMillan (1929-1992), and the 19th-century war horses (“Giselle” et al.). It’s even presented programs entirely composed of ballets by George Balanchine (1904-83), including — as if in friendly competition — several works danced by New York City Ballet.

Ballet Theater has also been the vehicle for the world’s foremost international stars, ballet’s answer to the Metropolitan Opera. (For many devotees, these luminaries have been the true cornerstone of Ballet Theater identity.) More recently, it’s become America’s foremost ballet flagship of ethnic diversity. Drawing from its JKO School, it has also developed its own classical style, recognizably and valuably different (especially above the waist) from that of City Ballet. And now the company’s new Women’s Movement has put it in the front rank of companies forging new opportunities for women in choreographing ballet.

But how many admirable policies can any company honor at one time? Currently it looks as if Ballet Theater has discarded Fokine, Ashton, Tudor, and — a big departure — the international stars from its scheduling. And who can notice Ballet Theater’s admirable purity of classical style? Its too-many-cooks approach to ballet obscures that.

Ms. Lang’s “Garden Blue,” new on Friday night, has obvious drawbacks; you can reasonably object to more about it than you can admire. And yet it’s a real theater piece, with a memorably peculiar conjunction of dance, music (Dvorak), and — especially memorable — design (by Sarah Crowner).

A striking tension — though it’s not wholly successful, it’s memorable — derives from the contrast between Ms. Crowner’s strong visual colors (sky blue, lawn green, buttercup, fuchsia, tangerine) and the largely muted sound of the music, the first three movements of Dvorak’s “Dumky” piano trio in E minor; Ms. Lang’s choreography creates an odd harmony between them. She makes some surprisingly huge acrobatic lifts to quiet passages of music, she responds to the music’s changes of speed but sometimes works pointedly against its meter, and she gives the dancers linear configurations and arm positions that enrich the stage picture.

Mr. Ratmansky’s “Songs of Bukovina,” new last year to a commissioned piano score by Leonid Desyatnikov, has suddenly fallen into place this season as it did not in 2017. (The pianist Jacek Mysinski may well be the deciding factor.) It’s a relative of Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering” (1969) in its amalgam of pure ballet, personal relationships within a community, and Eastern European folk dance. “Bukovina,” more conventionally hierarchical (one star couple, four supporting ones), is fascinating in its very specific folk details, and in the ways it sometimes isolates one or both its leading individuals from the group, as if in moments out of time.

Balanchine’s “Symphonie Concertante” (1947, to Mozart), revived for the first time this decade, looks more fascinating than ever before. Despite its resemblances to other Balanchine ballets of the 1940s and 1950s, it looks — more evidently than ever now — itself, with sumptuous choral architecture and a greater degree of same-sex partnering (two ballerinas) than in any other Balanchine creation.

While I take pleasure in almost all Ballet Theater’s present dancers, most of them seem striking more for potential as for fulfillment. Marvelous soloists abound; the superbly vivid Herman Cornejo and the unstoppably assertive James Whiteside are among the few principals who dance like stars.

But the season’s chief star so far has been a soloist: Calvin Royal III, now reaching his maturity. This marvel of rhythm, line, character and immediacy is irresistible in the Robbins “Fancy Free” (Ballet Theater’s production, seen only a week after City Ballet’s in the same theater, at several points seems more tellingly characterful) and in the new Dorrance “Dream within a Dream.” Often he seems to embody several layers of the music at once: meter, melody, harmony. Here’s hoping that his new freedom across the repertory rubs off on his colleagues.

Correction:Oct. 21, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of the set designer for “Garden Blue.” She is Sarah Crowner, not Sarah Crowden. An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a pianist. He is Jacek Mysinski, not Yacek Misinski.

Correction:Oct. 22, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the year George Balanchine died. It was 1983, not 1988.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Company Pushing the Limits of Versatility. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe